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During the 20th century there was a huge increase in the variety of music that people had access to. Prior to the invention of mass market gramophone records (developed in 1892) and radio broadcasting (first commercially done ca. 1919-20), people mainly listened to music at live Classical music concerts or musical theatre shows, which were too expensive for many lower-income people; on early phonograph players (a technology invented in 1877 which was not mass-marketed until the mid-1890s); or by individuals performing music or singing songs on an amateur basis at home, using sheet music, which required the ability to sing, play, and read music. These were skills that tended to be limited to middle-class and upper-class individuals. With the mass-market availability of gramophone records and radio broadcasts, listeners could purchase recordings of, or listen on radio to recordings or live broadcasts of a huge variety of songs and musical pieces from around the globe. This enabled a much wider range of the population to listen to performances of Classical musicsymphonies and operas that they would not be able to hear live, either due to not being able to afford live-concert tickets or because such music was not performed in their region.

Sound recording was also a major influence on the development of popular music genres, because it enabled recordings of songs and bands to be inexpensively and widely distributed nationwide or even, for some artists, worldwide. The development of relatively inexpensive reproduction of music via a succession of formats including vinyl records, compact cassettes, compact discs (introduced in 1983) and, by the mid-1990s, digital audio recordings, and the transmission or broadcast of audio recordings of music performances on radio, of video recordings or live performances on television, and by the 1990s, of audio and video recordings via the Internet, using file sharing of digital audio recordings, gave individuals from a wide range of socioeconomic classes access to a diverse selection of high-quality music performances by artists from around the world.[1] The introduction of multitrack recording in 1955 and the use of mixing had a major influence on pop and rock music, because it enabled record producers to mix and overdub many layers of instrument tracks and vocals, creating new sounds that would not be possible in a live performance.[2] The development of sound recording and audio engineering technologies and the ability to edit these recordings gave rise to new subgenres of classical music, including the Musique concrète (1949) and acousmatic[3] (1955) schools of electronic composition. In the 1970s, African-Americanhip hop musicians began to use the record turntable as a musical instrument, creating rhythmic and percussive "scratching" effects by manipulating a vinyl record on the turntable.

Neoclassicism

A dominant trend in music composed from 1923 to 1950 was neoclassicism, a reaction against the exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism which revived the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles. There were three distinct "schools" of neoclassicism, associated with Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Arnold Schoenberg. Similar sympathies in the second half of the century are generally subsumed under the heading "postmodernism".[9]

Experimental music

A compositional tradition arose in the mid-20th century--particularly in North America--called "experimental music". Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage (1912-1992).[10] According to Cage, "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen",[11] and he was specifically interested in completed works that performed an unpredictable action.[12]
Some of the composers who influenced John Cage were Erik Satie (1866-1925), Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Henry Dixon Cowell (1897-1965).

Contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s to early 1990s, which includes modernist, postmodern, neoromantic, and pluralist music.[13] However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 musical forms.[14]

Electronic music

For centuries, instrumental music had either been created by singing, or using mechanical music technologies, such as drawing a bow across a string that is strung on a hollow instrument or plucking taut gut or metal strings (string instruments), constricting vibrating air (woodwinds and brass) or hitting something to make rhythmic sounds (percussion instruments). In the early twentieth century, electronic devices were invented that were capable of generating sound electronically, without an initial mechanical source of vibration. As early as the 1930s, composers such as Olivier Messiaen incorporated electronic instruments into live performance. While sound recording technology is often associated with the key role it played in enabling the creation and mass marketing of popular music, new electric and electronic sound recording technology was used to produce art music, as well. The musique concrète (French: "concrete music"), developed about 1948 by Pierre Schaeffer and his associates, was an experimental technique using recorded sounds as raw material.[15]

Folk music

Folk music, in the original sense of the term as coined in the 18th century by Johann Gottfried Herder, is music produced by communal composition and possessing dignity, though by the late 19th century the concept of 'folk' had become a synonym for 'nation', usually identified as peasants and rural artisans, as in the Merrie England movement and the Irish and Scottish Gaelic Revivals of the 1880s.[19] Folk music was normally shared and performed by the entire community (not by a special class of expert or professional performers, possibly excluding the idea of amateurs), and was transmitted by word of mouth (oral tradition).[20]

In addition, folk music was also borrowed by composers in other genres. Some of the work of Aaron Copland clearly draws on American folk music.[21]

An important work on registering traditional tunes of the Balkanic region was that of Béla Bartók since it is probably the first composer who was interested in recording audios as well as analysing them from an ethnological point of view.[22]

Settlers from the United Kingdom and Ireland arrived in Appalachia during the 18th century, and brought with them the musical traditions of their homelands. These traditions consisted primarily of English and Scottish ballads--which were essentially unaccompanied narrative--and dance music, such as Irish reels, which were accompanied by a fiddle.[26] Many older bluegrass songs come directly from the British Isles. Several Appalachian bluegrass ballads, such as "Pretty Saro", "Barbara Allen", "Cuckoo Bird" and "House Carpenter", come from England and preserve the English ballad tradition both melodically and lyrically.[27] Others, such as The Twa Sisters, also come from England; however, the lyrics are about Ireland.[28] Some bluegrass fiddle songs popular in Appalachia, such as "Leather Britches", and "Pretty Polly", have Scottish roots.[29] The dance tune Cumberland Gap may be derived from the tune that accompanies the Scottish ballad Bonnie George Campbell.[30] Other songs have different names in different places; for instance in England there is an old ballad known as "A Brisk Young Sailor Courted Me", but exactly the same song in North American bluegrass is known as "I Wish My Baby Was Born".[31]

In bluegrass, as in some forms of jazz, one or more instruments each takes its turn playing the melody and improvising around it, while the others perform accompaniment; this is especially typified in tunes called breakdowns. This is in contrast to old-time music, in which all instruments play the melody together or one instrument carries the lead throughout while the others provide accompaniment. Breakdowns are often characterized by rapid tempos and unusual instrumental dexterity and sometimes by complex chord changes.[32]

There are three major subgenres of bluegrass and one unofficial subgenre. Traditional bluegrass has musicians playing folk songs, tunes with simple traditional chord progressions, and using only acoustic instruments, with an example being Bill Monroe. Progressive bluegrass groups may use electric instruments and import songs from other genres, particularly rock & roll. Examples include Cadillac Sky and Bearfoot. "Bluegrass gospel" has emerged as a third subgenre, which uses Christian lyrics, soulful three- or four-part harmony singing, and sometimes the playing of instrumentals. A newer development in the bluegrass world is Neo-traditional bluegrass; exemplified by bands such as The Grascals and Mountain Heart, bands from this subgenre typically have more than one lead singer. Bluegrass music has attracted a diverse following worldwide. Bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe characterized the genre as: "Scottishbagpipes and ole-time fiddlin'. It's Methodist and Holiness and Baptist. It's blues and jazz, and it has a high lonesome sound."[33]

The relationship (particularly, the relative value) of classical music and popular music is a controversial question. Richard Middleton writes:

Neat divisions between "folk" and "popular", and "popular" and "art", are impossible to find... arbitrary criteria [are used] to define the complement of "popular". "Art" music, for example, is generally regarded as by nature complex, difficult, demanding; "popular" music then has to be defined as "simple", "accessible", "facile". But many pieces commonly thought of as "art" (Handel'sHallelujah Chorus, many Schubert songs, many Verdiarias) have qualities of simplicity; conversely, it is by no means obvious that the Sex Pistols' records were "accessible", Frank Zappa's work "simple", or Billie Holiday's "facile".[38]

Country music

Disco

Disco is an up-tempo style of dance music that originated in the early 1970s, mainly from funk, salsa, and soul music, popular originally with homosexual and African-American audiences in large U.S. cities, and derives its name from the French word discothèque.[41]

Hip hop

Hip hop music, also referred to as rap or rap music, is a music genre formed in the United States in the 1970s that consists of two main components: rapping (MCing) and DJing (audio mixing and scratching).

Jazz

Trumpeter, bandleader and singer Louis Armstrong, known internationally as the "Ambassador of Jazz," was a much-imitated innovator of early jazz

Jazz has evolved into many sometimes contrasting subgenres including smooth jazz, Bebop, Swing, Fusion, Dixieland and free jazz. Jazz originated in the early 20th century out of a combination of the Blues, Ragtime, Brass Band Music, Hymns and Spirituals, Minstrel music and work songs.[42]

New-age music

Mostly instrumental pieces creating sounds of a soothing, romantic, mood-elevating or generally relaxing nature.[]Steven Halpern's Spectrum Suite, released in 1975, is generally credited as the album that began the new-age music movement.[43]

Polka

The polka, which first appeared in Prague in 1837, continued to be a popular form of dance music through the 20th century, especially in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and areas of the United States with a large population of central-European descent. A particularly well-known 20th-century example is Jaromír Vejvoda's Mod?anská polka (1927), which became popular during World War II in Czechoslovakia as "?koda lásky" ("A Waste of Love"), in Germany as the Rosamunde-Polka, and among the allied armies as the Beer Barrel Polka (as a song, known as "Roll out the Barrel"). In the United States, the "Eastern style" Polish urban polka remained popular until about 1965. Polka music rose in popularity in Chicago in the late 1940s after Walter 'Li'l Wally' Wallace Jagiello created "honky" polka by combining the Polish-American rural polka with elements of Polish folksong and krakowiak. A later, rock-influenced form is called "dyno" polka.[44]

Punk rock

World music

See also

Notes

^Watson, Allan. Cultural Production in and Beyond the Recording Studio. Routledge, 2014. (Multitrack recording and mixing made the recording "...studio a tool of musical composition" in which producers could "...create a reality which could not actually exist" in a live performance. p. 25)

^Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (University of Illinois Press, 2002), pgs 65-66.

^Musicologist Cecil Sharp collected hundreds of folk songs in the Appalachian region, and observed that the musical tradition of the people "seems to point to the North of England, or to the Lowlands, rather than the Highlands, of Scotland, as the country from which they originally migrated. For the Appalachian tunes...have far more affinity with the normal English folk-tune than with that of the Gaelic-speaking Highlander."
Olive Dame Campbell & Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, Comprising 122 Songs and Ballads, and 323 Tunes, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917, pg xviii.